


Things Lost

by LucyLovecraft



Category: Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword (1999), Trylogia | The Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Cute Kids, Flashbacks, Gen, MVPs: Michał and unnamed Cossack, Pre-OT3, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-09-13 11:30:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16891776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyLovecraft/pseuds/LucyLovecraft
Summary: A series of nested little scenes from the Childhood OT3 AU, in which Jan, Helena, and Jurko all grow up together at Rozłogi and are later separated when Jan is sent to what is essentially military school/squire boot camp at Łubnie.





	Things Lost

**Author's Note:**

> Please forgive the nested flashbacks, dear friends. This is incoherent nonsense, but alas! I worked out too hard, got too little sleep, and had too much whiskey to care. Such is life.
> 
> If you love me, you'll let me know of the most egregious typos in comments.

No, Jan thought. No, it couldn't be.

His heart plummeted. He went through his things again, searching each layer of neatly folded clothing, though logic told him it couldn't be there, but his heart wished it with such strength that it seemed he must surely find it this time. He searched everything, then went over it all again, each time with a little less of that methodical precision. Soon he was tearing at the contents of the chest, throwing cloaks and shirts to the floor only to fly to where he'd discarded them to shake them, hoping what he sought might be concealed in the folds.

Nothing! Still nothing!

Wild suppositions raced through his head. Perhaps he'd dropped it? But no, he'd put it away, safe in the chest. He'd sooner have left his heart lying beating on the street than lose what he had now lost.

Perhaps he was wearing it? His hand clutched at  his throat, and the _wrongness_ of not finding it there confused him for a moment. Yet that was reason he'd put it away in the first place—he had to keep it safe.

Had one of the other boys stolen it? An ugly, twisted kind of hope. Yet a stolen item might be recovered. It was better than the alternative.

 _Lost,_ he thought numbly. _I have lost it!_

He threw the last stray item of clothing out of the chest and ran his hands over the bottom, though he could _see_ that it wasn't there. Jan upended the chest, holding his breath so he might hear the object of his search rattle over the floorboards as it fell.

He’d locked his heart in a chest at the foot of his bed, and now it was gone.

He broadened his search, though tears began to blur his vision. It was not behind the chest—how could it have been? It was not under his bed, nor beneath the window. He crawled over the floorboards, up and down the room, lest it had fallen into a crack.

Then he sat down in the midst of the chaos he had made and searched his memory for some clue that could explain the catastrophe that had overtaken his life. Yet memory opened too many doors.l. Homesickness and loss came hand in hand to claim him. Irrational terrors followed: What if this was a sign? What if this meant he would never go home again? What if they had forgotten him? What if something had happened, and they were hurt? Or dead? What if he never saw them again?

Now thoroughly beyond the reach of anything but despair, the boy Jan Skrzetuski buried his face in his hands and began to sob.

He wanted to go home. They told him Łubnie was his home now, and that he would be a soldier and a knight. It had all seemed so very grand. There had been new clothes, and his father's sabre to be given to the sergeant at arms until Jan was grown (and then, oh, what glory!). But Łubnie wasn't home—could never be! And they'd said he'd be able to go home to Rozłogi to visit but they had never said when, even though he'd asked and asked, even though the other boys teased him, until at last he was told him to stop asking.

Now, he was sure, he would never go home, not until it was too late, and they would have forgotten about him.

Desolate and alone, he pulled his knees to his chest and wept as though his heart would break.

But he was not quite alone.

Feet padded through the hall, though only a cat could have heard those light steps. As they drew near they abruptly stopped and stilled, as though their owner listened. Then they raced to the door. It flew open and a little boy—much smaller than Jan—stood framed in the doorway. He still had the flaxen-pale locks of the young and fair-haired, and his eyes blazed, fierce as any falcon’s.

“Janie!” he cried, springing to his friend’s side. “What happened? Who did this?”

Jan shook his head but could only sob, now with the shame of crying like a baby added to all his other miseries.

Michał wrapped his arms around his friend. Upset by Jan’s distress, the boy’s soft heart began to ache, and soon he was crying too.

“Janie,” he sobbed, “what’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong!”

“It’s _gone!”_ Jan wept, rocking as he sat. “It’s gone, and now I’ll never see them again!”

Michał froze, sitting back on his heels.

“Is this about the necklace? The one from—”

 “Yes!” Jan wailed.

“It’s not lost! I took it! I’m sorry!” Michał began to cry in earnest, frightened by the enormity of his mistake.

This confession was so shocking that it stopped Jan’s tears. His chest still shook with echoing hiccoughs of the sobs that had racked him, but he could only stare at his friend in bewildered anguish.

“Don’t be mad! I’m—I’m—” Now beyond words, Michał’s hands scrabbled at a cord around his neck. He pulled a small pouch out from under his collar and pressed it into Jan’s hands.

Shrinking away with his treasure clutched to his chest, Jan ripped open the drawstring and emptied the contents into his palm.

It lay there, familiar to him as the hand that held it: a little wooden bird, carved with more love than finesse. What the carver’s skill had not captured, a painter’s art had supplied. The bird’s feathers had been picked out in whites and browns, with bright yellow eyes to suggest a hawk.

 

Or, perhaps: a falcon.

 

_“Jan?”_

_He looked up from his packing to see Helena in the doorway. One of her dark braids was clutched in her hand—a nervous gesture from a time when she’d held dolls close for comfort. Jurko stood behind her like a shadow, watching with eyes that always seemed too large for so small a boy._

_“You’re packing,” Helena said, face grave as she surveyed the room._

_“Yes. I thought… “ He’d thought if he packed, he’d be prepared, and this would all seem less frightening. Yet when he began he realised that, once he’d finished, he would be that much closer to leaving. And so the process dragged on, a Penelopean labour that had taken nearly half the day. “I thought…”_

_“I wish you weren’t going!” Jurko blurted out, staring at Jan with tears in his eyes, miserable but defiant._

_Helena bit her lip._

_Jan flushed. All three children had instinctively sensed that Jan’s departure marked an irrevocable change in their lives._

_Jan, long fostered at Rozłogi, would go to Łubnie to train to be a knight. He would be a soldier, like his father. And, when he was old enough, he would inherit his father’s lands._

_Helena had been given new gowns to mark the occasion—gowns that she was not permitted to run in, or to climb trees in, or to muddy by the banks of the stream. Helena was to be called “princess” now, though the word felt clumsy on Jan’s tongue. When she was old enough, someone would want to marry her, and she would go away._

_But then there was Jurko, whose future held no bright inheritance._

 

Jan remembered that first night:

 

_Jurko, whom they’d found sleeping in the barn on a winter’s night, wild-eyed and frantic as a cornered animal. He’d screamed when the household servants caught him, kicking and biting as he fought to get away. Yet Helena had screamed louder when her aunt insisted that the boy be whipped. Jan had begun to beg, saying that his uncle would surely be able to take another servant on._

_Unbeknownst to Jan, that had raised the spectre of outside scrutiny in Helena’s aunt’s mind. Bad enough that the Skrzetuski boy was here, fostered so close to Łubnie as a compliment to both Jan’s deceased father and to Helena’s. Prince Jeremi would remember Rozłogi so long as Jan was there. And Jan’s uncle enquired often of his nephew’s wellbeing, not quite trusting the old princess. The less fuss, the safer she and her sons would be. She could bide her time._

_So she had not whipped the little starveling. He’d been given bread and water and allowed to stay in the barn, with one of the household Cossacks to watch over him. Helena had been assigned to the same duty, as much as a punishment as anything else. And, where Helena went, Jan went, too._

_“What's your name?” Helena had asked._

_The boy crouched in the hay, eyes flitting from Helena to the Cossack servant, then back again._

_Helena took a step closer._

_“Careful!” Jan hissed, reaching for her hand to pull her back. She shook him off, never letting her eyes leave the stranger’s._

_“My name’s Helena. What's yours?”_

_“Maybe he doesn't have one,” Jan suggested, eyeing the boy’s filthy face and ragged clothes. It seemed unlikely that a human being could exist under all that dirt._

_“Everyone has a name,” Helena said definitively. She extended her foot, then slid a step closer to the boy._

_“Please,” she said, holding out a hand. “Won't you tell us who you are? We can be friends.”_

_Something strange, even frightening flickered in the stranger’s eyes._

_It was wrong, Jan thought. Wrong, for someone to look and act like this—to be so afraid. Without knowing a reason or cause, he instinctively recoiled from it, sensing what he did not yet understand._

_Jan held his breath as the other boy rose, drew in his own deep breath, then advanced one pace towards Helena._

_She stretched out her hand, nodding encouragingly._

_He inched towards her, shoulders hunched, wary as a cat. Then all at once he leapt forward and seized her hand. Helena started, but she did not pull away._

_Looking at them both, Jan was surprised to see that, though the boy had seemed some goblin of the steppe as he crouched there in the darkness, he was so starved and scrawny that his head would hardly have reached Helena’s shoulder._

_All three of them barely dared move a muscle._

_Then: “Jurko”._

_The boy whispered as though he were in church and Helena were the Madonna._

_“It's nice to meet you, Jurko.” Jan could hear the smile in her voice._

_All at once the little boy bowed at the waist, Cossack-fashion. Swathed as he was in layered rags that had (at some point in the far, far distant past) been garb for adults, the effect was one of a moderate-sized rag heap tumbling groundwards._

_“You’re a Cossack?” Jan asked._

_At once the boy straightened. He glared at Jan, his eyes twin blue flames in his thin face._

_“Yes!”_

_“Oh,” Jan said, confused to be the focus of such blazing hostility. He turned to Helena for direction, and she held out her hand to him. Jan went to her as naturally as breathing, standing by her side._

_“This is Jan, Jurko,” Helena said. “He’s going to be your friend, too.”_

_The boy frowned, looking from Helena and then to Jan. The fury had burned down, and the very nearness of the two other children seemed now to overwhelm him._

_“Why?” Jurko asked._

_“Do you not want to be friends?” Jan said, blinking in hurt and surprise. An affectionate child, Jan had never met anyone in his short life who rejected his love outright._

_The other boy stared at Jan curiously, searching his face. When he saw the tears beginning to fill Jan’s eyes, he let out a cry of dismay._

_“No!” He snatched up Jan’s hand, holding tight. His grip was strong, but the rags he’d used as mittens seemed to have done little good: what skin Jan could feel was bitterly cold._

_“Please, I want… I want that. To be your friend,” Jurko said. He was biting his lip, refusing to drop his gaze, but it seemed to cost him dreadfully to not flee back into the safety of the hay loft. “I want to stay.”_

_“We want that, too,” Helena assured him._

_“But the old bitch, she doesn’t like me.”_

_Jan and Helena’s mouths both dropped utter astonishment._

_The household Cossack, who to this point had been watching the scene as a disinterested spectator, let out a guffaw so loud that it made all three children jump into each other’s arms in fright._

_“Damn me, he’s a Cossack all right!”_

_Jurko leapt out in front of Jan and Helena, putting himself between them and the grown man. His small arms were thrown back behind him, one hand holding fast to both of his new friends._

_“Fuck off!” he told the grown man. “You and the old bitch can both go to the devil and fuck yourselves!”_

_Whatever result Jurko had anticipated, it was not reducing an adult male to a state of complete incapacitation. He gawked as the man clutched his sides, bent double, wheezing like a bellows._

_“You are very rude!” Helena hissed to Jurko. “She is my aunt!”_

_“You’re not supposed to say those words,” Jan said, full of horrified admiration._

_The Cossack man eventually recovered himself, though he still let out the odd gasp of laughter._

_“Ey, son,” he asked at last, “you any good with horses?”_

_Jurko said nothing._

_“Now don’t you glower at me like that,” the man said. “I’m going to do you a favour: I’ll tell the old bitch you’re a natural. Born to be a stable boy. How’s that?”_

_“I’ve ridden horses before,” Jurko said slowly. “But not… I don’t know how to use a saddle.”_

_“Stole them, did you?” the Cossack asked, giving the ragged little figure a shrewd look. “Huh. I’d say that’s a story so unlikely that I guess I have to believe you. But you wouldn’t fancy stealing again, would you?”_

_“No!” Jan cut in, bristling. “He wouldn’t!”_

_“Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?” the man said, grinning. “I’ll go tell the princess.”_

_And with that, he’d left._

_Jurko had turned about at once, putting his arms around Jan and Helena’s waists, hiding his face between their bodies._

_“I won’t steal anything!” he said desperately. “I promise! I just want to stay!”_

_“Then stay,” Helena had said, and kissed the top of his head._

_“Stay,” Jan urged. Then, suddenly, he knew what it was that had scared him in this boy. And he knew what to say to make it right: “You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”_

_“You mean it?”_

_“Yes,” Helena said._

_“Then I’ll stay!” the boy whispered, holding them both as tightly as his thin arms would allow. “I’ll stay forever!”_

 

Those words rang with a strange doom in Jan’s remembrance.

 

_Now, standing before his travel chest, with new clothes and gear spread about him, Jan felt suddenly ashamed. Helena, too, shifted uneasily._

_Jan would leave Rozłogi._

_One day Helena, too, would leave._

_And where would that leave Jurko? Another household Cossack in Rozłogi._

_The word “peasant” floated up in Jan’s mind, though he fought to push it aside. Yet the differences between them had never been so stark. Sometimes Jurko had been unhappy about it—about the lessons Jan and Helena shared, about the meals he ate in the kitchen with the servants. Jan had, in a way, always accepted these things as the natural course of events._

_Only now he saw the course these events would take, and began to sense how far his and Helena’s lives would leave their friend behind._

_Yet Jurko would be staying at Rozłogi. He and Helena would be together. They would at least have each other._

_“What if you forget us?” Jurko demanded._

_The question was so wholly unexpected that Jan could barely believe he’d heard aright._

_“Forget you?”_

_Had Jurko questioned the existence of sun, moon, and God in heaven Jan could not have been more astonished._

_“How could I ever forget you?” Jan whispered. He looked at his friends—his best friends in the whole world—and the thought that he must leave them seemed too awful to endure. “I’m… But what if you forget me? I’ll be gone!”_

_“Never!” Helena cried, eyes flashing. She hurtled across the room and threw her arms around Jan, her impact against him so hard that her braids thwacked against his shoulders. “We’ll never forget you!”_

_“I’ll find you.” Jan heard Jurko’s fervent promise, and felt his friend’s arms encircling his and Helena’s waists, as he’d done that first night in the barn. “When I’m bigger, I’ll go to Łubnie and find you. To be sure you don’t forget.”_

_“I won’t,” Jan promised._

_“But take this,” Jurko said._

_The three friends separated. Jurko held something out at head-height, stretching up to place it around Jan’s neck._

_Astonished, Jan looked down to see a little wooden bird hanging on a cord around his neck._

_“Oh,” he exclaimed, recognising one of Jurko’s carvings. And more than that: Helena had painted it, as she so often did._

_Overcome, Jan pressed it to his lips, then lay it carefully against his breast._

_“I’ll keep it with me always.”_

_“You promise?” Helena asked._

_“Promise us!” Jurko pleaded._

_“I promise.”_

_“And you won’t forget us?”_

_“Not a day will pass that I won’t think of you both.”_

 

 

Much had changed in Jan Skrzetuski’s life, but those promises were the sacrament of his soul.

 

 

Yet the clumsy little charm was not as Jan had remembered.

When Jan had last seen it, the eyelet through the falcon’s back—always fragile—had snapped. Unable to wear this, the chiefest of all his treasures, he’d stowed it away in the safest place he could find.

Now, where the snapped eyelet had been, a silver ring shone. Not only that, but a chain had been strung through it. The chain was, admittedly, a little greener than true silver tended to be, but it was far superior to the leather cord Jan had worn before.

Jan looked up at his friend. Understanding slowly dawned on his tear-streaked face, and it was followed by a look of such blissful wonderment that Michał’s poor heart could hardly bear it.

  _“Michał,”_ Jan breathed.

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” Michał sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “I’m sorry. I was stupid.”

“Thank you,” Jan said. “I was so afraid, but this… this is…” Abandoning words, he pulled his friend into a hug.

“I know how important it is to you. How important they are to you,” Michał said, hugging Jan back.

“I can’t wait for you to meet them.”

Michał held Jan even tighter.

It had been years since his friend had been home. But the way Jan acted, he might have left Rozłogi yesterday.

“I can’t wait to meet them, Jan.”

Michał knew, in his secret heart, that it would be long, long years before Jan went home again. And in his prayers, he asked God that Jan’s friends should be as true to Jan as he was to them. Yet he said none of this.

Instead, he said what he knew would bring the most comfort: “Tell me again how you met.”

Smiling, leaning his cheek against Michał’s fair head, Jan began the story, familiar and comforting as prayer.

“It was a winter’s night…”

It had been years since Jan Skrzetuski had seen his friends.

It would be years more.

But they had not forgotten him.


End file.
